HoY

Lol. I just starred the mission last night, spent 5 hours doing it, but before I actually got off the pad someone snuck a kraken egg onboard every time I reload or tab ships and come back the pilot flys out of the chair. Once I get him back in the ship immediately disassembles itself. On a kinda cool note, I got a 150m/s kick from Mun on my way by, only using 1760m/s to get my Jool encounter. And Tylo was intercepted immediately after the first aero pass and circularized at 60km for 990m/s. got this far without having to quick load but then failed a landing and tried again,, so far I'm stuck in a Groundhog Day situation..

In any case, it will be fun this will be my first actual flag planting too, since I've been on vacation I haven't been doing much more than building kethans rigs and not getting to use them lol The lander will have 4000m/s worth of fuel once it drops the rover so even if it was the same gravity as Kerbin, with no atmosphere it would still make orbit.

I was basing my estimate on the TWR listed in Engineer under the 'bodies' tab, switching between Laythe and Tylo the TWR stays exactly the same. I could be 100% wrong however lol, engineer is acting glitchy for me lately Now that I think about it, it costs 4400 dV to get off Kerbin, about 800 of that comes out as drag, that means about 3600 is spent actually against gravity and gaining horizontal speed. Tylo needs closer to 2500-3000 does it not? I haven't successfully done this mission yet, I've tested the lander and rover but haven't tried to get back into orbit so I'm not positive about the requirement

Yes they do. You need to make sure you have the empty fuel tank connected to the converter properly. Either in the same stack as the converter, or somewhere else on the ship with a fuel line running From the tank To the converter Edit, your actually right they don't make liquid oxygen. They make oxidizer, the second part needed for rocket fuel.

I'm in the process of sending a manned rover to Tylo on as light a ship as I can manage. I had a very nice design (kinda) that would get me there but unfortunately I underestimated how much extra fuel I would burn fighting gravity with such a low thrust engine. So I got stranded there with 900m/s of fuel remaining. Last night I started from scratch, re-using the concepts I developed over the last week so the build went much smoother. I made it into orbit on the first try, which is really a big deal when building light ships that have challenging missions to complete! I also switched over to a 4 wheeled rover rather than my preferred 2 wheel SegWay style. It's going to cost me a bunch of mass and lots of extra fuel, but I'm hoping the useability will make up for that. http://www.twitch.tv/hoyin1600p I'll be updating this post as the stream comes up and goes down, and as the mission changes. Keep your eyes open for it

Keep it up man

There's a mod that lets you change action groups after you're launched. At least there was in .19.1, I'm looking for it now its called something like action on the fly Edit; found it. Looks like it hasn't been updated since the thread was created but it may still work http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/showthread.php/24882-Actions-on-the-Fly-Edit-your-action-groups-in-flight-mode?highlight=Action Edit2; looks like Pontiac updated the mod, link is on the last page of the thread.

That will probably happen at the same time he adds the ability to switch from VAB to SPH symmetry

That's mostly because the turbo jet engines don't give their full 224kn of thrust until your at around 23km up. 20-25km is your most efficient (ISP wise) for turbojets. They get to about 109kn each while spinning up on the pad, maybe a little higher. This helps a lot with proper planning and engine placement you can avoid going over terminal velocity by guesstimating your TWR during ascent.

You can also throttle down, the engines use less intake air and fuel when throttled down.

Lol, i can YouTube it, I'll have to cut a bunch out as it takes about 40 mins to get up the first time while its full of fuel I do actually have a couple launches frappsed, if I haven't deleted them, they are part of my Laythe mission series that got somewhat abandoned from YouTube and has mostly been getting streamed instead. Know what, ill stream it anyway and link the video. Twitch saves it and keeps it after the stream is down. Edit; changed my mind. I was already planning on working on a hybrid rocket tonight on the stream anyway, so ill continue with that plan and give you the time stamp for when I actually launch it. It's a similar size, however it's not a SSTO it will ditch it's jets once they are all done being useful.

If your going that much faster than terminal velocity then you can do a couple things. Take a pair of engines off, and do your turn a little higher in thinner air. It's really hard to say exactly how to ascent as each craft is unique, but if your around in about 5 hours when I get home I can show you in a stream how I get the craft I posted earlier in the thread to orbit the same way.

At 45km with less than 1 intake per engine it was an engine flameout You can't fly this like a regular rocket if you go hybrid. Need a much shallower ascent path and more intakes than engines

I'm glad he necro'd it! I never would have seen it otherwise going to try it out tonight! (On the stream, in between tylo return challenge attempts)

I was just making a robbaz inspired joke I don't know much about RL countries space programs

Fixed that for you

I've never had that happen,, plus when you close the intakes it kills 100% of the engine thrust regardless. No spooling down, no uneven flameouts. Just dead. Never had it misfire on me since I started doing it that way, tho I haven't used a hybrid since .19.1 except ssto's that don't drop engines simply toggle them.

There's a chance that you accidentally placed a part between the engine and the tank while building. It may be obstructing fuel flow. I'd recommend removing both the tank and engine and adding two new ones from the part list. See if that helps?

When you jettison the jet stage do it with an action group that closes the intakes, shuts down the engines, and activates the decpuplers all at the same time. That'll stop an explosion caused by the engines still thrusting when dropped!

I was just thinking..... Is there any way to save the part config into the .craft file?? Say if we build a creation using this pack, save it then try to load it in a completely vanilla instillation? Is there some way we can get the information saved in the cfg for that part to actually make the part without it being installed. I know the .craft saves information from some parts and not just 'this part goes there', as an example look at docking ports that have been modified with lazor cam. It is info saved in the cfg for that part, but if you look in the .craft file the entries are all there from the part cfg.

I was thinking more along the lines of say a backbone structure for a large rover, with Girders and steel plates built into the single part. Having 1 part that has multiple parts that have different functions ie wings or engines or different types of fuel tanks would probably severely break the game. Tho I think having a bunch of the same type of engine clustered onto the bottom of a fuel tank, saved as one part, would simply come out as one engine with the combined thrust and mass, with the same vectoring effect, and also have fuel capacity as built in. The same way the welded rcs and lfo tanks merge their resources.

The easiest thing I could see being implemented is an out of game app that takes a small .craft file, reads the positions of the connections then generated a part out of it. Being done out of the game it would need a different, more general programming skillset that wouldn't restrict you to CS programming as I believe the unity engine needs? (Correct me if I'm wrong)

The lander is very similar to the one I used for minmus, except it has 2 flt-100 tanks on the sides as drop tanks with cubic struts installed on them for roll over prevention. I'm satisfied with my lander/rover/return crafts, I think my only remaining problem is going to be the launcher. Had an idea about jet engine placement for switching over to hybrid, tho its going to be kinda abusive of part clipping... And I'm not positive it will work like I hope it will, but I have to try I did the same thing while testing the lander, but it isn't completely accurate because I'll still have about 1km/s of fuel left in my LVN stage to do almost half of the landing with,, possibly more if I work on shaving down the landers extra fuel. If only we had some FLT-50's! Look like 1.5m wide pancakes lol. Rocket looks like this: 4 cubic struts installed off center on a stack decoupler with a seat and a small nose cone chute. This is all that lands back at KSC. Under that is the return stage. Probe core with an FLT-100 and Ant engine, with the kerbal on the chair in front of it it has a total of 3600m/s of dv. Under that is a stack Seperator, and the 0.6t manned rover. Made of an rtg, 3 cubic struts, 2 probe cores, 2 tiny wheels, and a seat. Under that is another stack Seperator, I'm using seperators so that the extra mass of the part is shed from Both sides. Another centered seat held in place on 3 cubic struts. A probe core with another FLT-100 tank and stack mount orange engine. On the sides of this I have two cubic struts with two stack decouplers and flt100's mounted on them as drop tanks for this stage. The tanks give the lander 1600m/s, then when they and the rover are shed on the surface the last tank with engine has 2100m/s left in it. Under that is an FLT-400 with 2 flt200's as drop tanks as the interplanetary drive. Aside from that I just listed all that's missing now is the test of the launcher. Was using aero spikes but in positive I can shave 20t worth of fuel and engines off by using jets. I actually played with the conic settings for the first time when I was attempting this mission a couple of days ago, and let me tell you, it makes gravity assists Sooo much better, when you add in MechJeb's aero brake calculator. I came in from interplanetary , did a gravity assist (not an intentional but not a harmful one) by tylo, aero captured at Jool, did a gravity assist around laythe and 1 more aero brake at Jool. A 60m/s burn got me a nice slow intercept from that point with Tylo again with a perhaps of 25km. By the time I was there it only cost something like 900m/s to circularize. The second I got a stable elliptical orbit I dropped the return stage off, saving me 1.5ish t, because the return section at that point was actually an ion ship similarly built but having 2x the dV I needed and 1/4 the twr and no dark side burns so it would be really hard to fix its orbit. This has been fixed with the new version. Like I mentioned it has a lot of extra fuel for just the return trip so ill burn some of it up fixing its tylo orbit once the lander has come back into orbit. Edit:: on a deltaV calculating note, 4 of the 400unit radially mounted batteries is equal to the mass of 1 kerbal while he's sitting in a chair. So stick 4 of them on the chair to get a more accurate dV reading from engineer or MJ

For Duna, take off All if those SAS units and nose cones, replace the cones with 4 parachutes, and possibly put a 1.25m probe core on the center tank of give you some extra torque. Won't need a fully powered landing inside Duna's atmosphere, tho you might want to use the rockets to slow yourself just a little before landing. By taking off all those SAS units that you don't need you'll save yourself probably 300-400 m/s of deltaV

So I'm doing a manned rover to Tylo with return vehicle for the kerbal.. Has anyone done a return from Tylo? What kind of target should I aim for on the pad? Right now it's coming in at just shy of 70t on the pad, tho I think I'm going to dump the standard asparagus for a hybrid jet system.